


The Fisherman's Daughter

by Missy



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast
Genre: Developing Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Heroine's Journey, Monsters, Non-Graphic Violence, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 07:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2843033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They thought to sacrifice her for her beauty.  They didn't imagine that she'd end up a legend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fisherman's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [who_la_hoop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/who_la_hoop/gifts).



They choose her because she’s more beautiful than the others. They snatch her up as she sleeps in her mother’s home, in the middle of the night, and impel her to walk at gunpoint barefooted, the jagged path leading to the beast’s cave. She can still hear them talking as she goes along behind them with her head down; they say she’s surely the purest and the kindest among them; surely she will be the one to save them all, to keep the village intact. Their needs outweigh hers, as they always have. 

Her ears are keen enough to notice various exclamations of joy, soft laughter, jibes. For them this is some great occasion of joy; the women in particular are happy to be rid of her. She has been told why and the reason shames her, makes her ears flame just to think of it. The truth was as plain as the beautiful nose upon her face; for when she had become of age two years before, the men had noticed her, and once they noticed her they grew obsessed with her beautiful features. Their men often stopped by the house to moon over her. Beauty deplores them, their casual ways and their demands, but though she often discouraged their advances they would still come to her mother’s window, disrupting her business, trampling the flowers she so valued and loved to sell. Her mother soon feared that they would rip her apart in a display of lustful violence and took to keeping her daughter at home, cloistering her like a beautiful bird in a cage.

It’s safer this way, too, because her nunlike existence also protects her from the looming specter of _it_.

It is a legend larger than small frail Beauty, more fearsome than a wolf; a shapeless black form with sharp teeth and rusty claws. It rips through the people’s livestock like a child into its first slice of bread, and takes with wanton greed from the land. There are long trails of blood left dripping in its wake, and the people of the village are wise to keep themselves indoors and away from their windows at night. Livestock are replaceable. Children stolen screaming in the night, well – they are a far harder loss to overlook.

At last, the whole group reaches the jagged, abandoned mouth of the cave. Pausing numbly before the gaping blackness, Beauty feels one sharp shove to her back from behind that trips her forward, over her own feet and to her knees at the ledge of the darkness. A jeer goes up, and she feels the tips of walking sticks prodding her toward the back of the cave. Someone tosses her a cloth sack of food, another a flint. Then they leave her to her fate and the darkness, where it grows morbidly quiet. If her mother is among them, Beauty does not know – nor does she care to know and have her heart broken irretrievably. 

For a time Beauty crouches in the corner of the cave, waiting for a death that wouldn’t arrive. Hours ticked by, the interior blackening, darkness consuming all, until finally she thinks to find a source for heat, for food, and curiosity and hunger overcome her fear.

She curls up against the dripping cave wall and feels her way carefully about, wanting to avoid further pain…and of course the monster himself. Moving along the walls she slides down the corridor, which stops and opens into a bell-shaped chamber. This is what appears to be the monster’s lair, and a very simple one at that - a bed of furs and an ember-strewn fire pit. It’s drier in this section of the cave, and it smells appealingly of woodsmoke. Beauty kneels to the task of preserving her supplies and strikes the flint against one of the large rocks resting beside. Stirring the embers until the pit takes to flame, she then opens the sack. There is lamb enough for a few meals, and she carefully pulls the moist meat into chunks before skewering them to cook.

After her meal her eyes grow heavy. Eyeing the empty bed with concern, she nevertheless turns toward it for comfort and soon drifts to sleep, nestled comfortably in the thick, warm pile of fur. 

 

** 

A chill wind wakens her in the early morning predawn hours, curling around her like a snake, penetrating the fur. She frowns and pulls the coverlet closer to her breast but still the cold penetrates her skin, looming heavy and wet, drawing her to consciousness.

And the second she opened her eyes she sees two red ones boring holes into hers.

The scream comes from her unbidden, nearly drowning out the bass of the monster’s anger. “How dare you disturb my home?” it shouts, and all Beauty can do is tremble, backed up against the wall, furs around her body, taking in the sight of the monster before her.

And an impressive monster he is. The face of a wolf emerges in the firelight; his body furry as a wolf as well, but bearing the strong, long legs of a stag. His eyes are dark and animal-bright, perceiving something in her that was foreign and unknowable to the human eye.

Such a sight should frighten Beauty, but she’s too furious to cower. “I didn’t wish to be here,” she says, eyes as bright as the fire. “My people brought me to your door as a sacrifice. They thought I might sate your hunger.”

She flushes at her own boldness, but the beast snorts. “I have no need of the likes of you,” he declares. “You may stay here for the night, but once you’ve rested you must go home.”

Beauty frowns. “What if I don’t wish to return? My life there was never easy – the men treat me as chattel. My mother hovered over me just to assure my safety. It’s no life I live there.”

“And what do you expect do to here?” asked the beast. 

Beauty juts out her jaw. “I expect to be useful,” she says. “I can clean and cook, and I know how to fish.”

He tilts his head, lowering it toward her, curiosity in his features. “Fish, you say?”

*** 

Indeed, she knows how to fish; when she was a child of three her father would take her to the village’s stream and teach her how to bait a hook. For him the fish fairly leapt into the boat and Beauty had learned all his ways before his passing. So, when the sun is high in the sky she and the beast travel to a deserted pond. It’s a secret place, one Beauty knows it to be rich in spawning salmon. The beast watches her move incredulously, his animalistic features fixed boredly at the pond. 

It takes Beauty a moment to properly gather her supplies; to bait hooks and to carefully shave a line from a thread of fabric. “Get on with it - I would like to return by dusk,” he declares. But Beauty well knows what she’s about; she smears the fabric in a mash of earthworm and seaweed before tying it to the pole and casting the line. Then there is nothing. Silence fills the air.

“Why are you the way you are?” she asks, as if to break up the echoed babbling of the brook.

He frowns. “I have always been as I am,” he says. “For as long as there have been monsters, so have I been.” 

His majestic statement dies off in a cry of surprise as Beauty tugs her line to the surface. At the end is a fat, frisky salmon. She unhooks it from the line and drops it happily into Beast’s open mouth. “Do my skills satisfy you?”

From his wild mastication the question’s already been answered. “You are surprisingly bright,” he says. “I might let you live for another sunset.”

*** 

The days pass merrily from then on. Beauty finds it easy to keep the cave clean, tend to the fire and fish for the beast; this means that the beast’s raids on Beauty’s hometown slowly peter off. The two exchange information about their childhoods, their shared feeling of isolation and loneliness.

As the spring evenings turn to summer nights, Beauty finds herself restless. She yearns to travel beyond the mountains, to find a universe beyond the one she’d been pinned to. 

“Well,” the beast rumbles from his shadowed corner. “What would _you_ like to do?”

It’s the first time any being – human or not – had thought to inquire after Beauty’s wants. “I would,” she says suddenly, “like to have a boat. A big, fine boat. And I’d love to travel as far and wide as I might…with you by my side of course, Beast.”

The offer had nearly died in Beauty’s throat, and at the look of rage on Beast’s face. “You wish to abandon me,” Beast roars.

 

“No! I want to go with you…”

The Beast begins to pace. “Do you know how the world treats creatures such as I?” he asks. “We are hunted in fear and anger; our fur is used to clothe you humans. There is not a safe place in the world for me,” he says. “I must live in the shadows. It is why I learned to talk like them, to understand them; so they could not kill me in ignorance and I would have the advantage of the dark.” He stares at her, mistrust written in his features. “If I let you go, will you promise to return?”

“Of course.”

Reluctantly, the beast says, “then I shall build you the boat. But if you do not return I shall be forced to kill.” His eyes glitter. “and this time I may have to eat up those humans in the valley.”

But she knows him now. Knows him well and true, and can comprehend easily what the real threat is. It isn’t murder by Beast; it’s the threat of his own self-destruction at the hands of the villagers. The weight of the threat lies on her heart, unfair, but stinging in a delicious way. Beauty gulps. “Of course, I shall return before the first snowflake falls. But you must not destroy yourself in the meantime.”

Beast’s gaze narrows at being found out so easily, but the vow comes from his lips anyway. “I promise.”

*** 

And so the Beast crafts a proper boat for Beauty, with her constant assistance. It is thick and oaken-planked; sturdy enough to bear her weight and protect her from any storm. She creates a bag of provisions for herself while he seals the craft over in pitch, smoking and drying fish over the fire and packing sturdy loaves of hearty bread. 

The leavetaking is not easy, and though it feels as if she’s being cleaved in half, it’s something Beauty knows she must do. Beast makes no protest as she casts off, and when the boat becomes nothing more than a white dot on the horizon. 

*** 

And so Beauty sees the world.

White-sanded beaches and purple mountains. Stalks of wheat and long grass. She runs across barren deserts and swims in forgotten lakes. In solitude, she learns much.

But also she lives with the pain of knowing she’d enjoy it all more with her dear beast beside her. 

Time passes oddly in these new Edens. Fear seizes her heart when she comes to realize that too much of it has passed – it’s likely winter. It must be winter, back where she’s from.

She turns the boat around and starts paddling for home.

*** 

It’s black midnight when she sneaks through the village. Nobody’s awake to recognize her - awake, she notes, for there is no sign of bloodshed on the cobblestone road. The bitter irony of it all washes over her – completely unnoticed after years of notoriety she has become a sister of the moon, of the darkness. Of the Beast. Her wrapped feet crunch against the snow as she sneaks back through the village, through the silent wood, and to the beast’s cave.

It is cold and quiet in its belly. Crawling on her hands and knees, Beauty feels through the muck until she touches a too-bony, fury body huddled against the wall.

He breathes, but for how long? Shaking his body, Beauty cries, “You cannot leave me now! Not when I have seen the world, known it all and found it lacking for want of you!”

Beast freezes under her touch – then from the depths of him rolls a soft chuckle. “You have tamed me,” says the Beast. “Is that not a fine trick?” 

“Please, please don’t go,” she begs. “Not when I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says.

She burrows against his furry body and cries out her fear until determination seizes her soul. She reaches for the pack at her side, then pulls free the fish she’d dried in another land, in what feels like a lifetime ago. She forces him to chew, then hunts up bones to make a broth.

“You’re going to drink this,” she demands, “until you feel strong enough to hunt.”

He does not gainsay her, but the spark of darkness in his eyes gives her a tiny thrill of hope. She will not nurture it until she seems him walking, but the first step has been taken.

*** 

It takes awhile to nurse him back to health, but he does return to vitality. Then do they revel in his health as the winter thaws into spring, the warmth melting the snow, bringing with it the knowledge that the curse of their loneliness has been forever broken.

They say you can still see them walking the hills together, the hauntingly beautiful, wild fisherman’s daughter with stars in her eyes and her wolf companion. And if you meet them on the first full moon after a snowfall, you can hear them howling a duet into the chill wind.


End file.
